Hello everyone!Last fortnight our team was actively working on the network, developing and improving it. We fixed some small bugs, solved the calculation delay problem (and we’re testing it now), and published several articles and manuals about working with testnet.

Network Activity Index is calculated in the testnet once per week and its amount affects the size and availability of emission. Emission is released only if the Activity Index in the last week was greater than in any other previous week. This emission is distributed amongst all the accounts in the network according to their Gravity Index.

In the third week of testing, Network Activity Index was 80, and as a result, 0 ZGV was created.

In the fourth week of testing, Network Activity Index was 30, and as a result, 0 ZGV was created.

For the past two weeks, Network Activity Index was lower than it was previously, and as a result, there was no emission in the blockchain those weeks.

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to our team for their active work on the project and wee would also like to thank some people personally. Many thanks to Brendan Jensen, who brought lively discussions to our official Twitter account and actively helps the community on our Telegram dev chat and Discord channel. Many thanks to Rieki Cordon and Cryptick Cryptick as well for their interesting ideas and activities.

Technical Updates

A main distinctive feature of our system, is Network Activity Index calculation and the emission calculation based on that calculation. Both of these operations require vast amounts of computing power and they cannot be calculated immediately. At the beginning, when the testnet was launched, everything worked fine. But as the testnet grew larger, the calculations began to take more and more time. They quickly surpassed the one-second limit. This is an issue because if blocks are not calculated every second, the system will experience forks and desyncs. In the testnet, forks are solved automatically, but some of the values still remain out of sync. Due to this desync, the last emission was released with a delay.

Due to this desyncing, we moved the heavy part of the calculations to a parallel stream. The calculations will be done the same way, but this way, there will be аn insignificant delay, within reasonable limits. We plan to implement this calculation method on Monday, and it will be tested and approved for an update on Tuesday. At that time, we’ll notify all witnesses to update the software so we can check on how the nodes work. After that we’ll need a lot of transactions to break the last emission record, in order to trigger another emission.. At that point, we’ll see if the system is stable and if there are any bugs to be fixed.

Plans for the future

We continue to work on “The Battle of the Bots”, which aims to increase the amount of bots as well as their activity in the network. Stay tuned!

Infrastructure

Gravity Wallet

New user statuses were added to the Gravity Wallet, and here’s also a new module with a referral program. We fixed the adaptive template and some small local bugs. Gravity Wallet design is ready, and now we work on the back-end. We’ll also continue working on stealth-transactions.

Mobile Version

We’re also working on a mobile app for Android and iOS and soon we’ll publish an article on the process of developing the wallet, which we would love to have some feedback on..

Explorer

We fixed some small bugs. There also will be some refinements related to the referral program.

Governance

Links to guidelines were also added which can help users to test the network within their in user account. There is also a new Rewards module, where users can find out, how much they will receive for a specific action.

During these two weeks we’ve also worked on the Gravity website. We updated the copy, added a [b=https://www.gravityprotocol.org/gravity_yellow_paper.pdf]Technical Paper[/b], refined module where network testing is described, and added links to our bitcointalk and Reddit threads. There’s also a module for fortnight reports now. Wechat was also added to the Chinese version of our website.

Our priority now, is to complete and release stealth-transactions, finalize the referral program and refine adaptability. Next week we’ll start working on new modules of the Gravity Wallet — dashboard, for example, where the data from all accounts will be stored. We will also add a module with information about tokens.

Documentation

We’ve completed the White Paper. Everyone can have a look on it in our Telegram dev chat.